“That in sourcing requires time before we get up to peak yield and performance so that in the short-term, dampens gross margin rate, but has a trajectory to improve gross margin rate over time.”

In context

“p me understand your guidance and triangulate that with your top-line and bottom-line guidance and triangulating that with your margin guidance? David Denton: This is Dave. Correct. Our guidance for gross margin, although we don't provide it specifically, we give us some color around the fact that it's approximately 70%. Obviously, our focus going forward is to improve our margin rate and more importantly, improve our operating margin rate to the bottom-line. As we look here at 2024, there's a few things that have compressed our margin rate. First is, as COVID has declined year-over-year, that has served to, I'll say, delever, if you will, the P&L as COVID takes up and cover some fixed overhead. But importantly, what's happening is we are in sourcing products that we've recently acquired. That in sourcing requires time before we get up to peak yield and performance so that in the short-term, dampens gross margin rate, but has a trajectory to improve gross margin rate over time. And then secondly, we have new launches that are coming online late in Q3 -- late in the second half of 2023 and moving into '24. Again, those are not at peak performance yet. That will ultimately improve gross margin rate as we cycle into later years. And then finally, I will say that over the last several years, we have absorbed some amount of inflation within our cost of goods sold. That is an area of opportunity for us as we think about improving performance longer term. So I hope that gives you some color. Operator: Next, we have Carter Gould with Barclays. Carter Gould : Maybe another kind of finance question here. Certainly, R&D in 4Q was meaningfully below kind of where you guys had set the guide there. How should we think about that? Does it just reflect sort of faster cost cutti”